


Unexpected Holiday

by Castillon02



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Character(s) of Color, Fluff, M/M, Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-20 11:10:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13145445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Castillon02/pseuds/Castillon02
Summary: As punishment for helping Bond on a mission, Felix is sent to Paris on the most boring ‘international cooperation’ mission ever. Luckily, while he’s there he meets Tim Kae, one of MI6′s accountants, and they take a liking to each other. Felix Leiter/OMC.





	Unexpected Holiday

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2017 MI6 Cafe Secret Santa exchange

Felix’s ass was about to go entirely numb. However, although one of the Brits—Saunders—was visibly stifling a yawn, none of the tightwads from the DGSE had broken yet; the French bastards were all still watching the presenter as seriously as men being informed about the details of their impending colonic operation. If Felix was going to uphold the reputation of the United States, there was nothing to do but stiffen his spine and continue to fake interest in the droning lecture of the forensic accounting expert who was clicking his way through his millionth PowerPoint slide.

The presenter made a triumphant-sounding remark in nerd-ese; Felix leaned forward slightly and made a thoughtful noise.

Goddamn politics. ‘International cooperation’–yeah, right. More like the DGSE had shunted its six CIA and MI6 visitors into the least interesting trainings it could scrounge up while still allowing them to check the ‘cooperative exchange of information’ box on their forms. The only thing comforting Felix at this point was that the DGSE was scheduled to send its own poor souls to visit Langley next year, so that the CIA could check its own bullshit share-and-care box on its own bureaucratic form. If Felix had anything to do with it then there would be a six-hour lecture on the virtues of not wasting everyone’s valuable time.

Well, almost everyone’s time. Six’s representative in the middle row had reacted to the first part of the lecture–the part that Felix had actually understood–with cool, collected nodding and occasional emphatic scribbles in his notebook. As the speaker had descended further into finance-ese, however, Six’s man had visibly perked up. He had asked six of the seven questions so far, he’d gone through several pages of notes in his notebook, and he’d smiled twice at something the presenter had said.

Kae, the man’s name was. Tim Kae. Korean descent, average height, frameless specs, clear baritone voice, biceps that strained the fabric of an otherwise impeccable navy blue suit…and he also had a cute smile.

If Kae had been giving the lecture instead of the nasally beanpole behind the podium, Felix might have paid more attention.

Instead, once the presentation was over, Felix made a point of intercepting Kae in the corridor. “Hey,” he said. “Long presentation. Want to get lunch?”

Kae frowned at him. “Why?” he asked.

The slight duck of Kae’s head, the way his eyes shifted away from Felix—Felix got the feeling that a low-and-slow approach might work better than hot-and-fast here. “Seemed like you understood what was going on in there better than I did,” Felix said. “Thought I could maybe persuade you to give me the Cliff Notes version. You know, in the name of international cooperation.” He darted an ironic look at Kae.  

After a long moment, Kae returned the look, snorting. “‘Made contact with CIA operative, assisted in learning to count,’” he said, miming writing a report.

“‘Successfully convinced MI6 operative to share valuable numerical information,’” Felix said, miming back and grinning.   

Kae said, “We’re eating somewhere that isn’t the cafeteria here, right?”  

“You know it,” Felix said. “In fact, why don’t you pick?”

“I’ve only been here for a couple of days,” Kae said. And Paris could be a little overwhelming for a first-timer, the wry twist of his mouth seemed to add.

“I’ve been to Paris a few times,” Felix said. “I know a good place not far from here.”

“Lead the way, then,” Kae said. “I’ll trade you my numerical information for your culinary knowledge.” His dark eyes caught Felix’s and they shared a small smile.

Maybe this visit wouldn’t be a waste of time after all.

***

Kae remained taciturn as Felix guided him through the cold, grimy streets of Paris, which was okay. Some days Felix wasn’t a small-talk kind of guy either.

Felix stopped them at a cafe he liked to go to for brunch, but which wasn’t bad at one in the afternoon either. “French soup and sandwiches,” he said. “Croque monsieurs and madams and who knows what else. Pretty good no matter who you’re eating.” He chanced a wink at Kae as he held open the door for him.

Kae rolled his eyes. “At least I don’t have to ask if you’re in field ops now,” he said as he entered. “A pun like that is a dead giveaway.”

Felix followed after him, and both of them straightened as the warmth of the place hit them full on. The smells of fried ham and simmering soup wafted tantalizingly from the kitchen.

Kae’s stomach growled audibly.

Felix hid his smile behind his hand.

“I might’ve had an early breakfast,” Kae admitted, glancing to the side, as they were seated at a table.

“Early bird, huh?” Felix commented. “That’s always useful.”

“Usually,” Kae said, peering at the menu. “Not when meetings let you out for a late lunch.”

Felix ordered a croque madame with pomme frites for himself; after a meeting like that, he deserved some french fries.

Kae ordered a croque monsieur with pomme frites and the beef bourguignon with mashed potatoes. “I can get the stew,” he added after the waiter left. “No reason for you to pay for three lunches.”

A polite offer; Felix always liked a well-mannered man. He also liked a man who was honest about his appetites. “I’ll just have to order some dessert to catch up,” he said, catching Kae’s eyes again. “Maybe we can share.”

A light flush brightened Kae’s cheeks. “That would be nice,” he said, returning Felix’s gaze. After a moment, he said, “So, did you actually care about going over what we learned in the lecture, or…?”

“I don’t really care about the details,” Felix admitted. “But I am curious about what got you so excited. Was Monsieur Beanpole in there really onto something good?”

“Good for accountants,” Kae said, steepling his fingers. “Which I am. He went over a few new ways to track the illegal things people might do with their funds. They’re also good ways to see where you might have otherwise hidden losses or gains in your own monetary system. Although usually when you’ve got a consistent source of preventable losses, you’re fairly well aware of it.” Kae took a deep, deliberate breath, not quite a sigh, and uncurled his fingers from where they were gripping the table.

Seemed like a guy who knew how to manage his emotions. Maybe Felix could help him find some other outlets for his deeply buried nerd rage.

“Anyway,” Kae continued. “It’s the kind of thing that’s exciting for paper-pushers, not so exciting for people who have your job.” He raised his eyebrows in inquiry.

Before Felix could answer, the waiter brought their meals. Momentarily distracted, Kae inhaled deeply over his stew and his fancy grilled cheese and made a happy humming noise. “Looks delicious,” he said.

“Here’s hoping it tastes as good as it looks, then,” Felix said, and promptly helped himself to a mouthful of salty, fried potato goodness. “Mmm.”

There was a lull as they did their best vacuum imitation on the food, but once they’d both finished their sandwiches, Felix picked up the conversational slack. “I’m here because my bosses told me to be here,” he said. “Which they probably did because I helped a friend of mine out–one of yours–and kept my mouth shut about it until he was out of the country. It was all above-board, technically, but so is sending me to get talked to death by the French for ten days.”   

“Ah,” Kae said, smiling slightly. “So you’re here as a punishment, and I’m here as a reward.”

“Think it’s working?” Felix asked.

“I did like the lecture,” Kae admitted. “And this food is way better than the pre-made salads I usually eat.”

“But you feel lost in a strange city,” Felix said, pushing a little.

To Felix’s delight, Kae glanced around, leaned in, and dropped his voice conspiratorially. “Everything is so _French_ ,” he said, his brow crinkling with frankly adorable dismay.

“Paris does tend to be pretty French,” Felix agreed, not bothering to suppress his sardonic glance.

Kae sighed. “I know,” he said. “I’m just…not very good at getting around new places, I suppose. I’d probably be the same if this were Edinburgh. I don’t know how you all do it—globetrotting, I mean.”

“Just like we do everything,” Felix said. “By breaking it down into manageable chunks, starting small and working our way up. Your hotel is somewhere close, right?”

Kae nodded.

“Then we can start by taking a tour of the neighborhood,” Felix said. “And while we finish eating, you can tell me what you’d actually like to see in Paris.”

“More of you, for a start,” Kae said. “If I’m not imposing.” He raised a challenging eyebrow.

“No,” Felix said softly, meeting his gaze. “Not imposing at all.”

“Good,” Kae said, the corners of his lips upturned in a smug-cat smile. Without a word, he moved his basket of fries closer to Felix, who had been eyeing them. “And maybe after we take a tour of my hotel, we can take a tour of yours.”

Felix laughed and shook his head a little. “I honestly did mean that your hotel is a logical navigational starting point,” he said. “But I have no objections to hotel room tours if you don’t.”

“No objections at all,” Kae said, looking determined.

Felix wondered if Kae often had casual partners, or if Felix was helping Kae have a daring holiday escapade–or maybe Kae was looking for a rebound, similar to Felix himself.

(Goddamn Bond waving his goddamn cock around and jetting off into the sunset after Felix had helped him fake his death.)

Well, whatever the case, Felix was determined too. The DGSE lectures might suck shit-covered ass, but outside of them, he was going to do his very best to show Kae a good time in Paris.

***

(Kae lifted Felix effortlessly against his bedroom door, grinding his thigh into Felix’s cock, and Felix’s stomach gave a hot swoop. “Fuck,” he said. “Kae—”  

Kae laughed a little. “Call me Tim,” he said. “And this is where you tell me your name.”

Felix blinked. Had he not done that before? Felix realized with chagrin that he’d assumed Kae would know it; there were only six of them in this inter-agency fuckfest, after all. But of course Kae—Tim—wouldn’t have a field agent’s need to background search everyone. “I’m Felix,” Felix said, recovering. “Felix Leiter.”

“Nice to meet you, Felix,” Tim said, and kissed him.)   

***

After enduring another interminable lecture the next day—this one about paint chip analysis—all but one of the DGSE people filed out of the room. The last one, a woman in a sharp pantsuit, turned to the six non-DGSE guests and said, “ _Bonjour_ ,” with a little wave. “I am Henriette, the person in charge of organizing the departmental gift-giving this year. We do a  _cadeau surprise_ ; I believe you say ‘Secret Santa’? If you would like to participate, you may draw a name out of the bag.” From an inner breast pocket of her suit jacket, the woman withdrew a black silk bag and held it out.

For whatever reason—probably the realization that this would be the most exciting thing that happened here—everyone participated. Felix drew his name out, holding his breath. A one in six chance…

And he got Daisy Saunders, one of Tim’s colleagues. Damn.

“Who’d you get?” he asked Tim as they walked to lunch afterward. Felix was in charge of lunch, they had decided, and Tim would use his google-fu to figure out dinner.

“Someone named Mark Beech?” Tim held up his slip of paper as proof.

“One of the Company’s finest,” Felix said dryly. “You know the guy with the mustache? With the pipe in his breast pocket? He does a lot of data analysis for us. Probably liked the paint chip thing today—he’ll soak up pretty much anything as long as it’s written on paper instead of something to see with his own eyes.”

“Ah,” Tim said. “Another paper pusher. And you got…?”

Felix told him.

Tim said, “She’ll be easy. She’s one of Q’s; she loves science fiction, engineering, that kind of thing. Always has impeccable budget proposals.”

Felix slanted a look at him. Was he that familiar with Saunders?

Tim shrugged. “It’s always easier to get people to agree to budget revisions if you can find some common ground beforehand. _Doctor Who_ is usually a good starting point with Q Branch. Also, we had time to talk on the train here.”

“So, you help me with Saunders and I’ll help you with Beech?” Felix asked. They had to get four small gifts and one big one, to be delivered on the last five days of their program, with a price limit of fifty Euros.

“Sounds fair,” Tim said.

***

(They ended up at Felix’s hotel that night.

“You have a gym,” Tim said, stopping in front of the glass door to the workout room so he could stare at the bench-press with starry eyes. “That’s not fair. I’ve been going a bit mad not being able to do my routine.”

“You want to get a bit hot and sweaty before we go back to my room and get hotter and sweatier?” Felix asked. He didn’t mind a pre-sex workout; endorphins were a wonderful thing.

However: “No,” Tim said. “I want to have sex, steal your room key and work out while you take a nap, and then surprise you with a wake-up blowjob.”

Felix swallowed and licked his lips. “You make a convincing argument,” he said.    

Tim darted a somehow shy look at him from under his lashes. “I thought I might,” he said.

***

Getting gifts for his Secret Santa recipient naturally turned into getting gifts for Tim. Felix was from Texas, and some primal part of him wanted to buy Tim chocolate boxes and milkshakes and tickets to the school dance. Paris not being known for its milkshakes, Felix settled for treating Tim to a bubble tea on Rue Quincampoix and kissing the taste of honeydew melon and tapioca balls from his mouth.

Later that day, Tim presented him with a box of pistachio macarons. It was one of Felix’s favorite flavors, and it was green just like the honeydew bubble tea.

“Is this going to be a thing?” Felix asked, smiling as he looked from the box to Tim’s face.

“I’m on holiday,” Tim said seriously. “And I don’t usually have people to get gifts for. It’s definitely going to be a thing.”

“Good,” Felix said. “Because I was about to say the exact same thing.”

They got their Secret Santas tacky fridge magnets from the natural history museum, on the grounds that Saunders liked dinosaurs and Beech _was_ a dinosaur. Tim had a secret knowledge of Latin roots–not anything like expert, he assured Felix, but he still translated all of the dinosaurs’ scientific names and got Felix to help him come up with newer and better ones.

“How would you say ‘dick-tail’?” Felix asked, looking at one particular specimen.

“Erm… _phallocaudae_ , maybe?” Tim said, laughing a little.

Felix hrrumphed. “You know, I can think of some people who might do better with that name.”  

“Or a better one,” Tim suggested. “ _Megaphallo gluteus_ –someone who’s a huge dick and an arse.”

One person came to mind immediately. Felix liked Bond—Bond was the agent that Felix could never allow himself to be, an uncompromising wrecking ball—but it was irritating as hell to cover for Bond’s ass and be sent to cool his heels with the French, and to not even get a ‘thanks, Felix’ bottle of champagne out of it. Bond was ordinarily a bit more polite. “Fucking Bond,” Felix muttered.

“Fucking Bond,” Tim echoed, agreeing.

They glanced at each other.

And that was how they found out that they were both in Paris on account of a certain double-oh agent, one who apparently kept wasting Six resources on unnecessary funerals that Felix had almost certainly been a party to causing (well, this time, at least).  

“He always thinks a fuck will make up for it,” Tim said. “And it does, in that I generally reinstate his pay afterward without making him go through Grey from HR, who hates him. But it’s almost adding insult to injury, you know? He already blows massive holes into the Q Branch budget, and the PR budget, and about six different damages departments whenever he blows up the wrong embassy, and then after all that we have to shell out for _yet another_ bloody headstone and service, and for the extra hours of grief counseling. 

And we never know if this will be the one that actually sticks, so it’s not like we can submit an invoice for a papier-mâché memorial. Anyway—” Tim lowered the arms he’d been waving to emphasize his points, “—he’s a brilliant agent, of course, but he’s rather maddeningly cost-inefficient from a purely bureaucratic standpoint. So they sent me here, I guess, in order to give me an unofficial sabbatical.”   

“Yeah,” Felix said. “All that sounds about right. Always been glad he’s in a separate agency.” He briefly explained his latest escapade with Bond to Tim.

“Yeah, he’s an arse,” Tim said with a sigh once Felix had finished.

“But he’s our arse,” Felix said.

“True,” Tim agreed.

“And really,” Felix said thoughtfully, “neither of us would be here if he wasn’t one, so probably we should send _him_  some ‘thank you’ champagne.” He darted a sly look at Tim.

Tim raised his eyebrows. “Like, with a picture of the fun time we’re having without him? That kind of champagne?”

“And a postcard that says, ‘Have fun doing mission reports in England while we enjoy ourselves in gay Paris,’” Felix said, pronouncing it like ‘Pair-ee’ in his most exaggerated southern accent.

“I am enjoying myself,” Tim said, smiling. “And I wasn’t before we met. So, thank you.”

Felix leaned in and bussed him on the cheek. “ _Pas de probleme_.”

Tim was cute when he blushed.

“Now,” Felix said, “what should we do to enjoy ourselves next?”  

***

The gift-giving continued throughout their stay in Paris. Meals, theater tickets, desserts, trinkets–he and Tim just plain liked having someone to spoil, it seemed like, and although Paris was rather miserably cold and wet, Felix always felt warmed by Tim’s company. After a couple of days, he gave in to the inevitable and invited Tim to move his things into his hotel.

The ability to lift enormous barbells whenever he wanted loosened Tim up in a way that even sex hadn’t so far. Also, Tim gave unpracticed but spine-meltingly thorough backrubs, and he practically wriggled with pleasure when Felix rubbed his feet in return. Felix patted himself on the back; sharing a room was definitely a good idea.

All too soon, their last day with the DGSE arrived, however. They gave their last Secret Santa presents (wine for Beech and Benedictine for Saunders, both well-received) and then they adjourned to that first cafe for one last lunch together.

Or so Felix thought.

“I know this is short-notice,” Tim said after they had ordered, “and I know we’re just—you know, on holiday together, and I understand that—but I have some leave, and I know you’re taking some after this, and I was wondering…would you like to go somewhere a bit sunnier with me?” He thrust an envelope in Felix’s direction, looking away and adjusting his glasses.     

Felix swallowed, opened the envelope, and pulled out two tickets to the Canary Islands. Delight rose in him, fizzy as a rootbeer float on a hot summer night. “I don’t know,” he said playfully. “This is a pretty big unexpected expenditure, right?”

“I always budget for holiday indulgences,” Tim said seriously. “And even if I didn’t, I’d budget for you.” His eyes stayed on Felix’s, dark and warm.

“I guess it’s goodbye  _Joyeux Noel_ , and hello  _Feliz Navidad_ , then,” Felix said, and they both smiled at each other, fit to burst.

***

When they got to their hotel, they sent Bond a postcard of the beautiful waters of Lanzarote, signed by both of them, wishing him a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and–just in advance of the next time–requiescat in pace.

After that, however, Felix thought far more of the delightful moles on Tim’s hip, and of the gorgeous noises he made when Felix scraped his beard against his thighs, than of anyone connected to work, and from the look and sound of things, Tim thought the same.

They spent Christmas in bed and on the beach in the sunshine. A few days later, Lanzarote put on a beautiful New Year’s celebration.

Afterward, they left each other (“Got to get back to the world,” Tim sighed regretfully), and although they never spent another Christmas together, every year Felix sent and could count on receiving a tropical holiday card.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! <3 Constructive criticism is welcome.


End file.
